But a preference that is understandable may not be wise, especially if carried far.
For the five or six years prior to his fall in 1962 Krishna Menon counted. No record of Nehru in those years can leave him out. He got a house opposite Nehru’s and, although it became a familiar sight to see him half-whispering to the prime minister in some corridor or at some public gathering or other, he developed the habit of slipping over to the prime minister’s house at night. There was no personal intimacy; there was no equality in the relationship; and Krishna Menon seems to have kept his worse manner well under control when with Nehru. More than once Nehru lost patience with him; especially with the atmosphere of tension he would generate. Whether the dislike for Krishna Menon—no figure in Indian public life aroused so much dislike—was justified or not, it is a fair question to ask if for all his merits he had the equilibrium for the role Nehru allowed to him. Some of his performance at the UN not only did harm to the standing of India. It lacked common sense. He had undoubted gifts yet there was something incomplete about him; and his very merits made the lack the more risky. It is also a fair question to ask if a leader and a ruler of India alienated from certain cherished Indian values to the extent Nehru was could afford as his principal counsellor a man who was alienated from them still further.
Was there another, and perhaps a deeper though possibly not quite conscious, reason for Nehru’s relationship with Krishna Menon? Is it too fanciful to wonder if Krishna Menon gave expression from time to time to certain subliminal things in Nehru which he would not allow his conscious self to express, such as on the West or on America or on race? Nehru by nature was an emotional man who had schooled himself into an iron self-control. It is for the psychologists to explain whether Krishna Menon might, over and above the more commonplace connections noted, have served the purpose of expressing Nehru’s subconscious mind for him and thus of materialising or getting out of his system certain demonic currents inside him.
* H.V.R. Iengar, Rafiq Zakaria, op. cit., p. 117 et seq.
* In Le Monde, May 27, 1964. Also see his Conversations with Nehru.
* Statesman, ‘Depth of Poverty’, November 12, 1961.
** R. Zakaria, ed., op. cit., p. 14.
* Karanjia, The Mind of Mr Nehru, p. 48.
** Quoted in Swarajya, June 20, 1964.
* The Das Report105—Mr Das was formerly Chief Justice of India—was released three weeks after Nehru’s death. (See annotation)
* Observer, May 1964.
* Krishna Nehru Hutheesingh, Nehru’s Letters to His Sister, February 1961.
CHAPTER 5
Building and Destroying
How much does a leader lead? How much more can he do than to give expression to the dominant mood of his time and place? Great leaders have no doubt done more than this, such as by slanting, at certain strategic points, the mood this way or that, and by seizing this opportunity or that. But, in general, leaders are less free than we are apt to think. Nehru himself once said in my hearing, when explaining to an Australian physicist why he had not taken a certain measure, that a leader cannot get too far ahead of his public opinion.
Bertrand Russell and Cow Worship
Nehru would have been made acutely aware at times of this limit on him as a leader because his motivations were so different from those of the majority of people in India. The world of Bertrand Russell, Shaw, Wells, and the Fabians, was largely the world of Nehru the political leader. The world of the majority of Indians is a millennium or so away from that world. How far away is recalled to us by what comes out in the Indian police courts; or, if this be thought too special, by what goes on in the villages. Four out of every five Indians live in the villages; the village world is a world of status, with caste as the hard core, of the gods and their sanctions, of the horoscopes, and of the sacred fauna.
That the gap between the world of the British scientific rationalists and socialists on the one hand and the cow-worshippers on the other could be bridged in a score or so of years has been the strange delusion of the Western world as well as of Nehru. But in any case a bridge was required between Nehru and the average Indian, and this would have to be in the form of some man more Indian than himself. His confidant Krishna Menon could not form the bridge. Vinoba Bhave, the leader of the land gift movement, one of the few authentic Gandhians left, understood, and was understood by, rural and traditional India. Nehru respected Vinoba Bhave personally but did not seem to take his movement seriously; which can hardly be surprising.
Jayaprakash Narayan was a different matter. He had as much feeling for the Indian spirit as Vinoba Bhave, but in addition he was internationalist and he understood contemporary economics and sociology. After a courageous period as a revolutionary nationalist he had become a disciple of Gandhi; and in most things he remained a disciple. He had also spent years in the United States and was therefore familiar with the world of machinery and factories and elected rulers; and, as a former Marxist, he was equally familiar with the conceptions of a planned economy. In the early 1950s Nehru had thought of making him his dauphin. But Jayaprakash Narayan, who had already renounced the material world, then renounced the political world. He abdicated his leadership of the Indian socialists and took to an ashram.
He did not renounce responsibilities as an Indian citizen, however, and, though smitten with diabetes, he travelled, wrote and spoke a good deal, always on the side of intelligence, goodwill and courage. He was never of bigger stature than in the last year of Nehru’s life. When so much which was spurious was raising its head he exemplified the India which is mature enough to endure self-criticism and to take the non-conformist line. After the anti-Muslim massacres in Bihar and Orissa he, together with some of his Sarvodaya111 colleagues, visited the scenes and systematically ran down facts. On April 16 he addressed a letter on the subject to the presiding officers of both Houses of Parliament and to political leaders. This appears to have impressed Nehru; but on the general public the effect was one of hostility. Undeterred, Jayaprakash Narayan lost no occasion for pleading for the injection of ‘a fresh dose of candour and courage’ in place of ‘a putrid atmosphere of hatred, hypocrisy, and moral smugness’. This led to bitter attacks on him in India, illustrating, incidentally, how far Nehru’s values of an anti-communal India were from a large number of Indians.* Early in May his life was threatened. Still undeterred, he turned to India’s relations with Pakistan, and notably over Kashmir. He pleaded for a confederal arrangement.** Nothing comparable, intellectually or morally, came out of Pakistan. He also turned to the other subject which was inflaming Indian feelings—relations with China. He suggested amongst other things that India should offer to lease Aksai Chin to China.***
Because Jayaprakash Narayan had renounced the political world, one man remained who could have supplied the bridge which Nehru needed, Chakravarti Rajagopalachari.
Rajagopalachari
Rajaji, as Rajagopalachari (sometimes written Rajagopalachariya) is usually called in India, would have complemented Nehru. Nehru needed the support of an equal. He needed, too, the criticism of an equal. After the death first of Patel, in 1950, and then of Maulana Azad, in 1954, the only man left who had a political experience, or a record in the independence movement, comparable to his own, was Rajaji. Rajaji had joined the independence movement as far back as 1907—he was eleven years older than Nehru—and in 1919, at the age of forty, he threw up a highly remunerative law practice to follow Gandhi and austerity. He served five prison sentences. Besides, he was the intellectual and moral equal of Nehru. He could have ended the situation prevailing in which no one could, or would, stand up to the prime minister; the situation whereby he was surrounded by men all of whom owed to him their jobs, whether as cabinet ministers or as officials.
Endowed with an exceptionally strong and quick mind, Rajaji was in spirit harmonious and without volatility or anything partaking of the theatrical. Vanity was excluded from his nature. Although he had so much affinity for traditional Ind
ia, he knew the lore of the West, having a good acquaintance with the Bible and Plato and the English classics as well as with jurisprudence and economics; and he knew the case for economic development. Although he was religious, and conservative, he was not conformist. He had the true conservative’s trait of combining scepticism about what man-made systems can do for human nature with the personal kindliness to individuals which socialists, dealing with human beings as statistical groups and abstractions, sometimes lack. And he had wit, that life-renewing gift.
Rajaji had been one of the first Indians to be premier of a state, and it would not be easy to show another who was better as premier. He had stood out as an able administrator as well as a ruler who knew how to command. Like Gandhi, he was though a Brahmin, as much a man of action as any soldier. And he knew the game of politics as well as Nehru did. His relations with the DMK112 during his late eighties showed that his politician’s hand lost none of its cunning to the very end. He was thus a practical man. He was a thinker, too. Gandhi leaned on him, for there was no sharper mind in the independence movement, which did not lack sharp minds. Gandhi loved Rajaji even when Rajaji refused to accept some of his policies, such as the Quit India policy of 1942. Gandhi’s son married his daughter. The range and force of Rajaji’s mind was illustrated week after week for the post-Gandhi generation in the weekly paper Swarajya. His articles were mainly on Indian politics, not always impartial about Nehru, but sometimes on physics, genetics, sociology, or morals. Being as much a citizen of the world as Nehru he gave close attention to the nuclear arms race. He was well aware what were the true priorities, and that the invention of the bomb dwarfed other priorities. To this end, at the age of eighty five, he left India for the first time in his life in order to persuade Kennedy, Macmillan and de Gaulle to give up the tests. Kennedy was delighted with his visitor and gave him his time generously.* He was in his eighties when writing his Swarajya articles. He was a natural writer. A master of English prose, he is also considered one of the best writers in Tamil, his fables and stories already being classics. His translations from the Sanskrit are also highly regarded.
Rajaji had succeeded Mountbatten as governor-general; being the first Indian and the last person in that office. He should have been the first President of India. Nehru tried to get him selected; but non-conformist spirits, especially when they join great force of mind to great force of character and to an unbending integrity, may be respected but usually they are too uncomfortable for the majority and so are not liked. The run-of-the-mill Indian politician never felt at home with Rajaji; and for the sufficient reason that Rajaji’s was not his home. They preferred Prasad, a respectable man but a natural subordinate, as head of state.
As the years went by Rajaji became more and more critical of Nehru’s policies and practices. In 1959, already over eighty years, he broke away from Congress and founded a new party, Swatantra.113 It provided the sharpest intellectual opposition to Nehru. He was particularly opposed to all the moves towards turning India into the leviathan state; and he particuarly feared the sort of hypnosis into which he believed Nehru’s unique personal standing was lulling both the Indian people and perhaps Nehru himself. He became increasingly sceptical about non-alignment; and he had doubts about some of the developments in the Afro-Asian world.*
As for the bridge, Rajaji could have been the bridge between south India and north India. South India has counted for too little in the Indian republic. This is a waste for India as well as an unfairness to south India, because the south has a superiority in certain important things—in its relative lack of violence, its lack of anti-Muslim intolerance, its lack of indiscipline and delinquency in the universities; in its better educational standards, its better government, and its cleanliness; in its far lesser practice of corruption and its little taste for Hindu revivalism. If the English language is saved to India as a living language it is the south which will save it. But Rajaji could have been a bridge of still greater consequence—a bridge between Nehru and the India of the average Indian; a bridge between the physical and technological needs of contemporary India which fired Nehru and the traditional India of timeless values which Rajaji, like Gandhi, valued.
Rajaji saw himself as standing for the religious view. He believed that, to quote his own words, there is a greater Reality behind the sense reality and that spirit is immortal. He feared that this was being lost sight of under Nehru’s government. He feared, too, the loss of freedom. But Nehru, too, respected the world of spirit; and, as well, he wanted freedom though he thought freedom was meaningless if men were hungry. The synthesis, not unattainable, surely, was never produced between these two freedom-loving and spiritual men. Here was great drama, two figures of Shakespearean scale in contest. And the drama was tragedy, for the contest was needless. Both men were required by India in the two crucial decades following independence; and both men shared the blame, though perhaps not in equal measure, that there had been fission, not fusion, between them.
Transitoriness of the Nehru Era
Nehru’s rule will leave some mark on India, but not as much as is expected. The future is likely to show that the roots did not all strike deep.
In the 1920s and the 1930s the British authorities both misunderstood and underrated Nehru. After independence he was misunderstood once more, but this time the world overrated his regime. What was ephemeral about it was rarely perceived.
Given his long personal dominance, misunderstanding was hardly surprising. His ministers counted for so little. Could half a dozen of the several scores of them serving in his cabinets be remembered by the public a couple of years after they left office? Yet the truth is that Nehru’s personal dominance masked the continuing existence of the deeper forces in the Hindu world hostile to his viewpoint, such as caste and regionalism. Illusions born of the masking were heightened by the sycophancy and the vested interests of the politicians and the officials who owed their careers to him, and of the journalists who owed their careers to publicising the current dominance.* The phrase ‘our great leader’ became an incantatory ritual. Foreign visitors encouraged the illusion, sincerely if ignorantly. Nehru himself, however, sensed that his policies could be transitory. That is why he was in such a hurry to set India firmly on the road to industrialisation and socialism, and why he had such a fear of Hindu revivalism.
Concealment of the truth might well go on for some time after the disappearance of Nehru from the scene. Lip-service might well be paid to him years after his policies have been given up, just as lip service was paid to Gandhi years after most of the things Gandhi stood for had been given up. Officially Gandhi remains the Father of the Nation. His policies, however, are, like his famous ashram at Sevagram, now far gone in decay.
Not that all the work of Nehru will perish. Even some of the good work, such as the new legal protection for women, might for once not be interred with the bones of the doer. The evil—or if a milder term be preferred, such as the less good—will surely live on. For instance the rousing up of the masses. It was Nehru who, with Gandhi, aroused the mob. In that way he brought new forces into play in Indian life. But they are forces for lower things than Nehru, or Gandhi, had in mind; and they could overwhelm the things he cherished. Then there is the power of unionised labour. Only a fraction of labour is unionised, and India has millions of unemployed, but the blackmailing by certain unionised groups, such as hospital employees or municipal garbage employees, due to the artificial labour scarcity their unions have succeeded in creating in those areas of work, is not reassuring. In addition to mob violence and to restrictive trade unionism there is also the related phenomenon of the rise, in all the parties, of a cruder type of leader. It is not merely that the expensively educated gentlemen, like Sir S. Banerjea* or the Saprus, have almost disappeared; they belonged to a class which is now disappearing in most countries. It is that the public man is, like the whole world of public life in India, getting on to a different level—less educated, less disinterested, less public spir
ited, and more concerned, indeed almost exclusively concerned, with interests: local and caste and personal, and in concrete material terms. This earthiness, too, goes with a proneness to narrow nationalism. Examples occur on all sides in India today, and not only examples drawn from the two great vested interests of the trade unions and business. A Bengali writer has shown some examples recently in his study of what he calls the Plebeian Revolution and the resulting change in the leadership of the Communist Party no less than in that of Congress.* In south India the revolution takes the form of the campaign against the Brahmins, who are now rapidly being pushed down to the status of a depressed class.**
Nehru the man wanted passionately to destroy the caste system though he remained indestructibly a product of the caste system—through and through a Brahmin. When in his youth he came into contact with the English he discovered several things which shook him, as they shook most Indian students coming into contact with England and the English. He discovered that he was an Indian and not merely a Brahmin and a Kashmiri from UP; for that is how the mass of the English, inevitably ignorant of the Indian social system, saw him—as an Indian, not as a member of this or that caste from this or that region. He came to feel, too, a shame-like disapproval for some Indian ways of life; and he discovered what he thought was the means of getting rid of the unworthy things, especially the poverty. The means were the rationalist and socialist ideas which represented the advanced thinking in England at the time.
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